Word: lifeness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...woman he has really loved for some seven centuries. Cindy, alas, is not quite the innocent she was in her past lives. She divides her evenings between the discos and one-night stands, popping uppers and downers as if they were Good & Plenties and generally leading a thoroughly disorganized life. She has been having an affair with her analyst (Richard Benjamin) for years, but both are beset by the modern inability to make a genuine commitment. He, it turns out, is a descendant of Dr. Van Helsing, Dracula's old nemesis from the book, play and sequels. The analyst...
There is nothing at all absurd about the human condition. We matter. It seems to me a good guess, hazarded by a good many people who have thought of it, that we may be engaged in the formation of something like a mind for the life of this planet. If this is so, we are still at the most primitive stage, still fumbling with language and thinking, but infinitely capacitated for the future. Looked at this way, it is remarkable that we've come as far as we have in so short a period, really no time...
What in the world can he find to be hopeful about? As it turns out, almost everything. Most simply, Thomas argues that the overwhelming tendency in nature is toward symbiosis, union, harmony. The post-Darwinian view of life as a constant, murderous struggle, Tennyson's personification of nature "red in tooth and claw," do not match the facts that Thomas has seen. Even what looks like random slaughter may be the opposite...
...jellyfish are once again tiny parasites, and the whole cycle begins anew. Which one is the predator, then, and which one the prey? This underwater dance lends Thomas' new book its title and occupies the first essay; its implications echo through all that follows. Life may not be a matter of eat or be eaten; it may boil down to eating and being eaten...
...great infectious diseases, especially tuberculosis and lobar pneumonia, which used to cut us down long be fore our time." Humans are not frail organisms coveted by every death-dealing microbe in the world, as so much pop medicine would have it. Quite the contrary: "We are in real life, a reasonably healthy people. Far from being ineptly put together, we are amazingly tough, durable organisms, full of health, ready for most contingencies...